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Roughly five hours after an internal email went out Friday to Amazon employees telling them to remove the famous video app TikTok from their phones, the online retailing massive displayed to backtrack and calling a ban a mistake. “This morning’s email to some of your employees was sent in error”, Amazon emailed reporters just before 5 P.M and Eastern time. “There is no change to our policies right now regarding TikTok”.
Amazon is calling an email that went out to employees Friday saying them to remove the famous video app TikTok from their phones a mistake. That would have escalated the stakes for the TikTok that has been subject to the national security and geopolitical concerns.
Amazon has also said the employees to delete the famous video app TikTok from phones on which they use Amazon email, citing security risks from the China-owned application.
Organization spokeswoman Jaci Anderson declined to answer queries about what caused the confounding turnaround or issue. The beginning internal email, that was disseminated widely online, told the employees to remove TikTok, a video app going popular and famous with the young people but also the focus of growing national security and geopolitical concerns due to its Chinese ownership. The email cited the App’s “security risks”, employees worldwide. Amazon didn’t reply to the requests for comment immediately.
Amazon is the second-largest U.S. private employer after Walmart, with more than 840,000 employees worldwide. In an emailed statement, TikTok has said that Amazon didn’t notify it before sending the email and they said “We still don’t understand their concerns,” it continued, adding that the company will welcome a dialogue to address the issues of Amazon.
Chinese internet enormous Byte Dance owns TikTok that is designed for the users outside of China, as well as the Chinese version is known as Douyin. The application is famous for young people, including millions of American users but is the subject of national security concerns.
TikTok has been trying to mollify critics in the U.S. and distance itself from its Chinese roots but find itself caught in an increasingly sticky geopolitical web. TikTok currently named a new CEO, top Disney executive Kevin Mayer, that experts said could serve it to locate the U.S. regulators and it is stopping operations in Hong Kong because of a new Chinese national security law that led Facebook, Twitter, Google to also stop providing user data to Hong-Kong authorities.
But a top Trump administration official said this week that the government remains concerned about the security threat concern of nation to the app’s millions of U.S. users. When Fox News TV host Laura Ingraham suggested that the U.S ban Chinese social media apps, “especially TikTok”, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that “We’re certainly looking at it.”
Pompeo said the Trump administration has “worked on this very problem for a long time”, including its stance against Chinese telecom firms ZTE and Huawei. The government has tried to convince allies to root Huawei out of telecom networks saying that the company is a national-security threat, with mixed success. Huawei has denied that it enables spying for the Chinese government.
“With respect to Chinese apps on people’s cell phones, it definitely will happen that the United States will get this one right tool, “Pompeo said and the additional that if users downloaded the app their personal and private information would be “in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.”
TikTok, such as YouTube, trusts on its users for the videos that people its app. They are under a minute long, and many feature dancing and lip-syncing. TikTok has a standing as a fun, but it has racked up concerns ranging from censorship of videos, including those critical of the Chinese government, the threat of sharing the user data with the Chinese officials, and also violating kids’ privacy.
TikTok has content-moderation policies, such as any social networks, but says its moderation policies, such as any social network, but says its moderation team for the U.S. is led out of California and it doesn’t censor videos based on topics sensitive to China and wouldn’t, even if the Chinese government asked it to. As for sharing U.S. user data with the Chinese government, the company says it stores the U.S user data with the government of China, the company says it stores U.S user data in the U.S. and Singapore, not China, that its data centers are outside of China and it wouldn’t give the government access permission to the U.S user data even if prompted.
Amazon might have been concerned about a Chinese-owned app’s access to the employee data because the U.S government says that China regularly steals U.S intellectual property, said Susan Ariel Aaronson, a professor at the George Washington University and data governance and the national-security expert.
